


Panopticon

by CytosineSkald



Category: Batman (Comics), Batman - All Media Types
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-13
Updated: 2017-08-13
Packaged: 2018-12-14 22:08:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,906
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11792457
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CytosineSkald/pseuds/CytosineSkald
Summary: A watched pot never boils, they say. So Barbara -- Oracle -- would make sure the Joker was the best watched pot in all of Gotham. In the history of watched pots. Maybe then there would be a measure of peace.





	Panopticon

**Author's Note:**

> Had a challenge going with my good friend thatsrightdollface wherein we'd each write each other a few lines of a prompt, and we'd have to finish it. This is the result! The first five sentences are hers. :)

Barbara had known she would feel outnumbered, when all her dozens of screens were tuned to his lanky, crooked self – she had willingly hung him all around her home and workstations, sometimes monitored in the present, sometimes preserved from years back.  There he was laughing, and plotting; there he was throwing gibbering fake teeth explosives at the Batman and then getting dragged back to Arkham to nurse his wounds.  She wanted to know him, to predict him, to unravel his coding the way she’d unraveled so much else as the Oracle.  He was the thing she hated most in all that old, rotting town.

Predictably, Dick had said having a bunch of screens with the Joker on them staring at her all the time was a little unhealthy. Equally as predictably, she had continued on, allocating space, time and energy to installing new monitors, making sure they worked, getting out of her chair and dragging herself along the floor to lay cables and wire them up proper.

It had started with one screen, just off to the side of her main bank when she was given her office with the Suicide Squad. Just one dedicated monitor for the Joker’s Arkham cell. She had stared at it a lot in those early days -- closed out the day with the Squad by rolling back from her desk and hunching over that monitor, knuckles white on her knees as she watched him just… be. Waller had left her idiosyncrasies well enough alone -- “Amy Beddoes” was allowed to keep her secrets, so long as she did her job. By the end of her time with the Squad, she had three monitors, each providing a different angle on his cell. Poison Ivy had draped herself over the monitor bank once, sitting on the table and inspecting her nails. She’d said that Barbara had ‘kind of a creepy obsession’, but left it mostly at that when she was given what she wanted.

“It’s like you’re in love with him,” Ivy had said, feigning distraction as she’d hung around the door on her way out. “I know a girl who was. Is. I don’t think it’s a good look on people. Tends not to end well.”

“I’m not in love with him. Trust me.”

“Not that I care -- but it’s probably better for your health that way.”

When she left the Squad, she’d started over, setting up her servers in an apartment instead. She’d also set her three monitors back up, painstakingly oriented, camera angles chosen, volume just so. She told herself it was okay -- that it was almost normal, to do what she did. Her therapist said that reasserting a feeling of control over her fate was healthy in the grand scheme. She doubted this is what the doctor had meant. Something about looking at his dead man’s face, stretched into that grin was almost steadying, when she was most unsure. When she was feeling lost, she turned and her computer bank was there, and she could watch him pace his cell like a velociraptor, watch him chatter to himself and his cell-mates down the hall, and the earth steadied under her. Maybe it was schadenfreude, but maybe it was something else.

Three monitors turned into five. A static view of his cell turned into a program that tracked his face through Arkham and could adjust video feeds accordingly -- hall views, cafeteria views, anywhere in Arkham, she could follow. An apartment became a clocktower. Monitors became holographic projections. Miles of cables remained, buried under the floor. Moments spent breathing deep, surrounded by the Joker’s laugh, his footsteps pacing his cell, his row with the Riddler down the hall… those remained, too. His laugh echoed in her ears. his face swam behind her eyelids when she closed them. When she looked around in her office, if she flicked a switch she could be surrounded by views of him, of recordings of his incarceration, footnoted and timestamped and earmarked with places security was lax, things that could be improved. It was her crossword, her sudoku, it was her needlepoint and her crochet. A pastime. A destressor.

“Why do you do that to yourself?” Dick asked her once, running a hand through her hair distractedly as they watched a nature documentary. It was his after-patrol ritual she’d found a fondness for. No people in these shows. Just David Attenborough and an array of brutality that was  _ clean _ and  _ simple _ , ordered as nature would allow, with not a human being in sight. Ants swarmed to make a bridge of their own flesh and she watched as he tilted his knees to touch hers, though she couldn’t feel it happening. “Why do you surround yourself with the thing you hate most in the world?”

“Does it bother you?”

He hadn’t wanted to say yes, but she knew it was the word he was biting back. And it was unfair, because no matter how much he or Bruce or her father could say they weren’t going to let the Joker hurt her ever again (all in tones she resented, like she was fragile, as if she needed them to shield her, as if she wouldn’t die for the opportunity to take care of the Joker herself), nothing soothed her quite as much as switching the feed over to watch him pace, to hear him singing things to the guards that sped up their pace just so. It wasn’t fair. Dick and Bruce and her father -- they should be enough. She loved them. They should be enough.

But the conversation had died, and she’d let it. She left the question unanswered even when she elbowed him in the ribs to go get in bed before he passed out on her sofa -- again. He shuffled away, and she sat for a few minutes, looking at her hands, before settling herself back into her chair and wheeling to her office. A wave of her hand, and five dozen screens glowed to life. No less than sixty angles on the Joker, past and present. She sat, hands white-knuckled on her knees, and felt her eyes burn as she looked up at him as he laughed, and laughed, and laughed. He’d laughed as he’d peeled her clothes back, laughed as he’d folded them up almost comically neat for the police to find, laughed and given her directions on how to model when he’d flashed photos of her in her own blood. She was amazed that in her pain she’d even found the room for shame.

She hated him.

She  _ hated _ him.

She had never hated  _ anyone _ like she hated him. She had  _ told _ Bruce to be careful. She had  _ told _ him. And he’d said ‘that’s not how it works between us’ and waved her off, and because of it she had listened to him laugh and laugh and laugh as she realized through agony and naked shame that she couldn’t feel her legs, she'd had to watch her father bury the woman he had loved for as long as she could remember, and a little boy whose hair she’d ruffled and whose cigarettes she’d basketball-shot into the garbage was rotting in a pine box six feet underground. Sometimes it was all she could do not to try to reach through the screen and just… shake him -- the Joker. Slam him into the wall. Batgirl him into submission, and demand of him “Why!?”.

But even if she could (which she couldn’t), even if she could ask (which she wouldn’t), she knew what her answer would be.

He’d laugh.

She’d cry, and he’d laugh harder.

That hatred was an anchor in a way Dick would never understand. It drove her in a way he couldn’t comprehend. He was too good. He was too lovely, too beautiful -- the fairytale princess that came out of hardship singing to little birds. He didn’t let his world hinge on pain. She hated the Joker in a way she couldn’t rise above, couldn’t escape, and didn’t want to -- and she hated him all the more because she knew, deep down, that that was  _ exactly _ what he had wanted.

Dick was a deep-breathing lump under her sheets when she descended from her Delphi, feeling suddenly helpless in her hatred, even if sure in her actions. He curled, curiously self-contained and vulnerable-looking, along the side of her bed he’d more or less claimed, and in that vulnerability she felt her reasoning settle itself in surety. The answer was simple, and after she’d settled herself next to him, hauling dead legs under sheets, and after she’d made peace with his clingy need to shift closer to her, she’d given it to him.

“It makes me feel safe.”

“Hmm?” He was nearly asleep, and she was sure he wouldn’t remember in the morning, even as she settled her cheek against his shoulder.

“I’m afraid of him. More afraid of him than I’ve been about anything, and I feel like if I know where he is -- if I can  _ always _ know where he is…”

“Mmn.”

“Then I can keep him from hurting anyone else.”

“Mm-hmm.”

“I won’t lose anyone else to him. I won’t lose Tim like we lost Jason. I won’t lose Bruce like I lost Sarah. I won’t lose you. If I know where he is…” She thought of ants swarming together into something larger, something disgusting and strong and made of many parts, and she wished she could cant her knees against his under the sheets. “Then I know he can’t hurt me.”

“Mmmm.”

He’d shifted and pulled her almost uncomfortably close, and while it was more a drifting to warmth than conscious effort on his part, it was also somehow just what she’d needed. Someone warm and breathing and  _ safe _ . A safety that was freely given, rather than made. Safe in the quiet of 5am in Gotham, with the sun just starting to light the horizon and the city at its quietest. Safe in the knowledge she was keeping her fairytale princess and his family safe. Safe in the knowledge that the Joker was on sixty screens in her office, with footnotes written on security lapses to be sent off, pacing a ten by eight padded cell. Safe even as she closed her eyes, and he paced through her dreams -- laughing.

In the morning (as far as Morning went for members of their little family) Gotham would still be alive. She’d have to do a round of trigonometry to figure out how to extract herself from the Clutches that would end with a simple pat on the chest and “Sweetie, let go”. There would be a quick, irritated scuffle over him having put a practically-empty container of cream cheese back into the refrigerator (“Just throw it out!” “There was stuff left in it!” “Like a finger’s worth! Just finish it and throw it away! What am I supposed to do with that? Put it on a crouton?” “I’m sorry!” “Ugh. Typical.” “I didn’t come here to be attacked” “No, you came here to fill my fridge with lies, clearly.”), and then truce over toast. She’d run some information for Dinah, and he’d iron his officer’s uniform. She’d watch the news in her chair, and he’d watch the news in a handstand. And if, after he kissed her goodbye and hared off back to Blüdhaven, there were sixty-one screens for the Joker to fill -- well.

At this point, what did it matter?


End file.
